Sleep D and Kuniyuki at 15 Years of Butter Sessions, Photographs by @duncographic
Choose love.
Sang wrote this on my left hand on Thursday afternoon. It washed off in the shower on Friday morning, but I retraced it before going to Butter Sessions‘ 15th birthday party later that day. It was Good Friday and Butter Sessions had curated an afternoon and evening of deep and breaksy techno and dubby downtempo across three stages at Collingwood Children’s Farm.
Sang and I spoke about what it means to choose love as we walked through Collingwood and Abbotsford on our way to the event. It might sound like a benign slogan, to choose love, but it is radical, said Sang. The challenge – and the true radicalism – lies in continuing to choose love even when your defences, frustrations and despair prompt you to do otherwise.
Choosing love means not choosing cynicism, division or zero-sum rivalry. It means learning to notice the difference between loving yourself and clearing a space so that no one can come near you. There are many things, both material and psychic, that can prop up an inward, self-serving disposition; that will keep us confined to ourselves.
But to be alive – as opposed to dead – is to be in connection, said Sang, and to insist that togetherness matters. Respect matters. Excitement matters. Smiles shared between strangers on the dancefloor matter. Thudding kick drums, hips cocked, hearts open, hands in the air, fingers sketching a thousand rainbows in the sky – all of these things matter.
I have stopped reading the news.
I have also stopped checking social media. This might sound like I’m choosing not to care, and that I’m privileged enough to do so. But I have stopped believing, at least for now, that getting a play-by-play of the abject actions of the US, Israeli and Australian governments is achieving much more than burning me out. The more I scroll, the worse the news becomes, and the further I sink into pessimism. My rage turns into exhaustion, my love gets sidelined by dissociation.
I want to keep it local, I said to Luke while we were enjoying Pjenne’s set of deep and funky beats in the late arvo. I want to come together, even when it’s not super convenient. I want to stay excited, and to remember, as James Baldwin said, that if I don’t live the only life I have, I won’t live some other life, I won’t live any life at all.
“Never trust a thought that occurs to you indoors,” Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo.
There’s something so special about these afternoon and evening dance parties at Collingwood Children’s Farm. It’s not just that you’re outdoors, surrounded by trees and standing beneath the bright, full moon in Libra, but that it really feels like you have entered nature. Nature, as Iris Murdoch wrote in the The Sovereignty of Good, is uniquely capable of shrinking the “fat relentless ego.”
Reflecting on the godlessness of secular societies, Murdoch equated the individual’s fat, relentless ego to the biblical concept of original sin. Choosing love, I think, is like paying attention to God.
In Murdoch’s philosophy, virtue is encouraged by anything that “alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness.” Dancing on a farm among a large group of people is fun. It breeds and disseminates excitement. It allows us to sidestep rationalised risk-aversion and feel our feelings in our bodies.
There are plenty of forces of distraction and enragement that one might come to a dance party to escape from, and many urges and appetites to indulge. But gathering in groups and letting loose is not selfish.
“Congratulations to label bosses Corey and Maryos,” Darcy Justice wrote on Instagram. “Two of the most humble and talented people I know.”
A shitload of brainstorming, emails, phone calls, backup plans and ad hoc alterations must’ve gone into organising Butter Sessions’ multi-city 15th birthday tour, the apex of which was the Good Friday event in Naarm. But there was something so casual about the open-air party, so humble and talented.
Yeah, we’re taking over the best venue for a mid-scale music festival in Naarm, they seemed to say. And yeah, we’ve booked a dozen or so of the most characterful DJs and producers from the Naarm underground, and also invited a select few international visitors, including Japanese warmth emitters Kuniyuki and Gonno, who were behind two of my favourite sets of the day, full of bendy bass lines and relentless kick drums. (Other favourites were Tangerine, Hasvat Informant and DJ PGZ.)
And yeah, this city’s dance music scene would be unrecognisable without the decade and a half of parties and releases from Butter Sessions – a label that was founded in Frankston and has always prioritised taste, excitement and heartfelt intimacy, rather than following trends and chasing big names. They’ve kept their ears to the ground for new originals even as they’ve promoted loyalty to the community. They’ve kept it local in attitude, if not always in geography.
And yeah, it’s a big fucking achievement to keep working in the music industry for 15 years without any commercial hits, without getting sucked into the infinite growth vortex, and without burning out completely.
And yet, despite all this, how welcome we felt at the label’s 15th birthday party, and how much we were made to feel like we, too, are part of Butter Sessions’ success story – not simply by showing up, but also by choosing love.
15 Years of Butter Sessions Records took place at Collingwood Children’s Farm, on stolen Wurundjeri land, on Friday 3 April.
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